BYU President Kevin J Worthen remembers when he was the age of many college students, listening to some of his acquaintances sharing stories about how the Spirit had given them specific directions in dramatic ways. But he couldn’t readily recall any such personal experience of his own.

“Admonitions about the need to receive revelation intimidated and, quite frankly, worried me more than a little bit,” he said.

“I started wondering whether I was missing something,” he told students during a campus devotional at Brigham Young University on Tuesday, September 11. “I began to imagine that I would get up to the judgment bar, and God would say to me, ‘I tried to tell you what you needed to do in life on such-and-such a date and again on another such a date, and you just missed it.’”

That feeling was only compounded during his mission, when he was paired with a companion who “genuinely had a gift for knowing where to go to find people who were ready to accept the gospel.”

While Worthen took a logical, street-by-street and door-by-door approach, his companion would feel impressed to skip houses or entire streets.

“And more often than not, he was right,” Worthen said. “But I rarely, if ever, felt such promptings. Thus, for much of my youth and young adulthood, I wondered if I had been born spiritually tone-deaf.”